The Beekeeper's Voyage
by Syd Pinkerton
Summary: In the 1920s, a burned-out jazzman crosses paths with an aging Sherlock Holmes while making his way across the North Atlantic as a low-rent sailor. Before the night is over, the discovery of a dark secret will shake both men to their cores. Currently a one-shot, though I may expand if I get a good response.


We were making our way south from the Orkneys, boilers running hot, when I heard the Englishman's violin.

Sighing, I rose to my feet and ran a hand through my hair. After three months in the salty spray off the decks, it felt like tangled rope.

Bainer, seated across the galley table from me, just chuckled to himself and blew on his tin cup of coffee to cool it, churning up the rising steam and fogging up his glasses. "Just give the old sod his breathing room, Tarr," he told me. "He ain't worth losing any sleep over."

I shook my head, breathing slowly. "Yeah, but the Captain's gonna tan somebody's hide if that loon wakes him up. He hates me enough already; I ain't giving him no excuses."

"As long as you don't wind up like that sorry fucker Kindering, you're square with me," Bainer told me.

I raised an eyebrow.

"Ah, I guess he left before you came aboard," he said. "That was his problem, though. He got into one ruddy argument with the Captain over wages or cargo or some such nonsense, and he just up and vanished. Probably left to go drink up his pay in a port town somewhere, the lazy little chiseler."

The Englishman's violin grew louder, a resonating scratch without rhythm or grace.

"You ever wonder why he puts up with _him_?" Bainer asked.  
I didn't have to wonder.

"I heard he paid a nice wad of cash for his cabin when we docked in Sussex," I said. "He promised the Captain more for every port he made it to safe. Nothing in the deal said either of them had to like it, but they're square as long as the captain doesn't throw him over the side some night."

"What do you have to bitch about then?" Bainer asked me.

The notes from the violin sped up, climbing into shrill squeals and flattening out into low wavering drones.

"He didn't pay _me_ shit," I mumbled.

I was already on my way out of the galley when I said it.

I could smell the boilers close by, coals gathering heat as smoke rose in black tendrils from the ship's rusted iron chimneys. By the deck railing, fishing nets lay discarded in slick wet piles, still plastered with the cast-off remains of gutted cod and haddock. The sea was black glass, teased with the thinnest ripples left in our hull's wake. No vanishing whitecaps. No moonlight caught in the still water's surface. Just me, the cool night air, and the fevered sound of strings.

Turning a corner, I saw his thin silhouette against the faint glow hidden by the clouds. He held the violin bow like a tuning fork, but he moved it like a saw-blade. He stood by the railing of the ship, his eyes lost in the ocean horizon.

I raised my voice.

"English!"

It was the only name anyone ever called him.

His hand froze, and he set the bow on the deck.

"One of the worker bees, come to shut up the old fool before the Queen starts to sting?" he asked.

His voice was dry and cracked with age, with a mocking edge to it.

He picked up the violin and walked over to me, a faint smile on his thin lips. His gray hair was swept back carelessly from the sharp angles of his face, wind-burned and lined with age. His eyes were brown, his eyelids paper-thin and creased at the edges. When he blinked, I thought of pages turning.

"Don't you ever sleep?" I asked him, cocking an eyebrow.

With his free hand, he pulled a pipe from the pocket of his worn grey coat and busied himself with packing tobacco in it. There was a sharp curve in the stem, and the letters _S.H._ were written in gold on the bowl.

"Thirty years in London, with hooves on the cobblestones and the factory boys trying to outshout each other at the pubs every night," he said. "Sometimes the silence catches me off guard, I suppose."

I couldn't help but smile at that.

"Hell of a ways to go just for a change in scenery. Ain't it, English?" I said.

"You're a long way from home as well, my boy. American—that's obvious. From that way you chew on your words, I'd hazard a guess that you've got family waiting in Brooklyn, yes?"

"Not much of one. Not much of a town, neither. Once the bright lights start to wear on you."

"Ah, but for a deck hand's wages, you leave it all behind? You're looking more than a change in scenery."

"You trying to write my biography, English?"

He pulled a match from his pocket, lit his pipe, and slipped it between his lips. A curl of smoke rose from the bowl. Even with the pipe in his mouth, he managed to smile.

"Wouldn't fetch many copies at the newsstands, but I could give it a start," he said.

He took a long drag on the pipe.

"From those cuts on your hands, I deduce that this is your first extended brush with manual labor. No worries—it happens to every first-time sailor when the captain makes him handle a rope. Ah, but the voice and the gait say working class, and the milky complexion and the straw-colored hair say you've got a dash of German blood in you."

"Dad was Irish. Other than that, though…"

"Immigrant stock, then. With the family in Brooklyn, I'd warrant there's a family business thrown in there somewhere. Shopkeepers, perhaps?"

"Bakers."

"Quite right. And there's that peculiar way that you pinch your lips to form vowels. An odd form of muscle memory that I used to see in the men of the London Symphony from time to time. You're a musician, then. With a predilection for the woodwinds. _Saxophonist_ would be my first guess. From the way you mention your family, I'd say pastries and buns didn't suit you."

"Dad couldn't run the bakery after the Influenza laid him up, so he gave it to my older brother when he came home from the war. He came back with a medal, too. Always going on about all the French girls that wanted to come back with him. "

"So you took up music. But there aren't many working-class Brooklyn boys playing with America's more reputable symphonies, are there? So what was your business? Perhaps something to do with that barbaric racket from the Harlem speakeasies?"

"Got me there."

"From what I've glimpsed of the ship's records and past bills of lading, we've no regular ports in New York to stop at, so it's unlikely that you boarded from there. You've done some travelling, then. Touring band?"

"That's right."

"So you were on the road. Things do happen on the road, don't they? Now, this isn't the first time I've glimpsed you. On deck, I've noticed that you're the only man on the crew who never removes his shirt when working in the hot sun. Could be the fair skin—but I've never seen you roll up your sleeves either."

Suddenly self-conscious, I tugged at the frayed cuff of my shirt.

"Then there are the glimpses I've caught of you in the galley. You seem to devour _coffee_ with more relish than anyone else on this boat. So we have a Brooklyn boy who ran away from home, spent plenty of time on the road and in the clubs, he won't show anyone his arms, he has a particular love for coffee—as if it's a close substitute for something else—and he's so desperate to get away from something back home that he takes take a low-paying job on a boat, miles from home, doing hard work that he has no experience in. What am I to make of that?"

I fixed him with a cold stare and moved to turn away. My hands were trembling.

"It's just that fucking simple, isn't it?" I said.

I wanted to spit it at him like a curse, but my voice came out in a whisper.

"Most things are, when you see them like I do," The Englishman said. "For what it's worth, I'd do the same thing if it were me."

"What the fuck do _you_ know about it?"

"I know that cocaine was easy enough to come by in London back in my day," he said. "And I know that breaking such a habit is easier when you share a flat with a doctor."

I turned back around to face him.

"You here to preach, or you just showing off?" I asked him. "Old geezer like you, you'd think you'd have it all figured out by now. But here we are—on the same rusty boat, headed in the same goddamn direction."

He puffed on his pipe. The bowl glowed, and I saw the creases in his forehead deepen.

"In the same direction? Well, I suppose that all depends on which one of us gets off first," he said.

With his pipe clenched in his teeth, he stooped down to pick up his violin. I heard his joints crackling in protest, as if shaking dust from their crevices.

"It's a dark night, my boy," he said. "My eyes aren't as sharp as they once were. I don't suppose you could be troubled to help an old man back to his cabin, could you?"

I paused at that, nodded.

"I, ah…I suppose now I know everything but your name," he said.

I smiled. "Tarr. Jack Tarr. In the band, I was 'Tar Baby'. Guess now I'm just Jack."

He gave me a dry, huffing laugh as he shuffled along, putting a hand to the nearest bulkhead to steady himself.

"You got a name?" I asked him.

"Ah, I do. But it seems you know it already, my boy," he said.

"Guess I do, English. Guess I do."

Close by, Bainer was heading to his bunk below decks. Somewhere off in the distance, the wind was picking up.

I took the Englishman's hand and led him down the slick metal steps that led below the deck. His cabin was at the end of a long passageway. He had the largest quarters in the ship after the Captain's, but that came along with the money he'd paid for passage. The rest of us slept side-by-side in the hammocks, every man's foot in another's face.

We reached the door to his cabin.

"There we are, now…"

He stepped inside and bent down to strike a spark in an oil lamp that stood on a desk. A flame rose up at the heart of the lamp's fluted glass chimney, and a strange warm golden-yellow light filled the room.

I poked my head in.

The shelves above his desk were stocked with row upon row of honey jars, each of them filled to the top and labeled with a strip of tape. When the lamp flamed to life, every jar caught its light and reflected it back.

I tiptoed inside. The moth-eaten blanket on his bunk was thrown off carelessly into a heap, and the sheets were stained with the gray marks of tobacco ash. Under the jars of honey, the desk was piled high with papers.

"Here, now…" he said, running his fingers across one jar. "Who says you can't carry a bit of home in a jar, eh?"

"You bought all these in London?" I asked.

"Goodness, no…" he said. "Since retirement, it's been the South Downs in Sussex. Tending to the hives, writing a bit…"

"Retirement from what?" I asked.

He laughed at that. "If I told you that, I suppose I'd have to kill you," he said.

I came closer to get a closer look.

"Every jar of honey has a taste of its own," he told me. "Cotton honey, clover honey, thistle honey, sandalwood honey, leatherwood honey… The bees have their own language. But if you've got the smoke to put them to sleep and an eye for the right shade of gold, they speak to you plain as day. Now…"

He walked over and reached up to pluck a thick jar from the shelf, topped with a checkered red lid. The label said 'sage'.

He handed it to me.

"Not many gifts I have left to give. But I've got that."

It had been three months since I'd eaten anything but porridge and hardtack, drunk anything but tinny water and bitter coffee.

"Nature's sweet manna. Like having a summer sunrise glued to the roof of your mouth," he said.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd said _Thank you_ to anyone. The words felt strange on my tongue.

"Whenever the silence in the countryside dragged me down, I always turned to my bees. London was always a hive of a different sort, but all that smoke could never calm it down," he said.

He hobbled across the cabin, lost in thought. "Honest creatures, bees. You can always count on them to keep you busy…"

"You think you'll ever see the hives again?" I asked him. "Most people walk onto a ship like this, it's because they've got nowhere else to go. They don't know if they'll ever walk off."

He turned away from me and moved to arrange a stack of papers on the desk. A letter addressed _Dear J.W._ lay at the top.

"I suppose you know that from experience," he said. "You started your voyage ready to be buried at sea?"

For a moment, I was silent.

"You don't do the things I've done because you want to live forever," I said.

"I suppose dying isn't what worries you," he said softly.

"I just always remember the first time we left port. All that shining blue around me. Made me wonder if I'd ever see dry land again," I said.

"Water was always a weakness of mine. I stay away when I can help it," he said.

"You have trouble at sea?" I asked him.

With his face turned from mine, he picked up his papers and stuffed them into a drawer.

"I fell from a waterfall when I was just thirty-seven," he said. "I seldom dream. But if I did, I expect I'd be kept up many a night with dreams about the way the water rushed over the rocks. Or the way the sunlight burned my eyes when I fought my way up and realized my heart was still beating."

"Jesus…"

"I suppose there are worse ways to go," he said. "Makes for a fine story."

He turned around to face me, made his way over to his bunk and sat down. The skin hanging loose around his neck quivered as he took deep breaths.

I walked over to the side of the cabin to grab his blanket. He nodded his thanks as I passed it to him.

"That's the peculiar problem with stories, my boy. They're all around us. So joyful to hear, so tiring to live. The best ones always end with pain. All the others just drag on until there's no one around to listen."

He sat there on the bed, his chest heaving. He gathered the blanket up around him.

"You look like you could use some rest," I told him.

He shook his head.

"I've been telling myself that for years. Even when I couldn't admit it to myself, the doctor was always there to remind me, bless his soul. I wish he could have seen me come this far."

He pulled a little silver pocket watch from the front pocket of his overcoat. I could see an inscription, engraved in elegant swirling script, standing out against the polished metal.

_"To Sherlock, with all my love—J. Watson," _it said.

"Friend of yours?" I asked.

"The only one I ever had," he told me.

With his hands shaking, he flipped up the cover of the pocket watch, nodded, and slipped it back into his pocket.

"There's time enough," he said. "Time enough for one last voyage."

I frowned.

"It's been so long since I had someone by my side," he said. "Sometimes it makes all the difference."

"Difference?"

His gray eyes took on a strange faraway look as he leaned back against the cold metal of the bulkhead.

"If I asked you to follow me out, for just a few hours…would you take me up on it?"

"Follow you where? We're not making port for weeks."

His eyes narrowed.

"Sleep on it," he told me.

And I did.

* * *

Kane, the navigator, came to my hammock to shake me awake.

After three months at sea, I could sleep through any storm. But the feel of his cold hand on my neck jolted me awake with a touch.

"It's the Englishman," I heard, as if from far away.

Through hazy eyes, I saw Kane's weathered face, flanked by grey muttonchops, looming above me.

"He wants to know if…"

"…if I'll follow him out," I finished.

Kane nodded.

"Where the hell are we?" I asked.

A ghost of a smile crossed Kane's face. "The old bastard slipped me some cash when he came aboard. Fifty pounds for cooperating, another fifty for keeping my mouth shut about it."

"What?"

"I've been steering us north since Sussex," he said. "We're stopped by some rock in the Shetlands, now. Just off Scotland. The Englishman seemed real keen on getting there, but he didn't want the Captain to know. If he asks, we've just stopped for repairs. As far as he knows, we're still on our way south."

I jerked out of the hammock. Without a sound, I slipped my boots on and made my way up to the deck.

The Englishman was waiting by the rail, a burlap sack slung over his shoulder. The clouds had shifted now, exposing a wide crescent moon that shone like a silver hook. Out of the dark water below us, like some mountain set adrift, an island waited.

The Englishman turned to face me. The wind was picking up, and the red threadbare scarf that he wore around his neck fluttered like a war flag.

"I've paid my own way to come this far," he said. "Don't make me stop now."

I looked out towards the island. Black sands marked the shore, cold water lapping at it like the night itself set in motion.

I thought of gas lights flickering over Brooklyn, of my brother nodding off to sleep in his warm sheets with a fine dusting of wheat flour settled deep in the nooks and crannies of his hands—maybe wondering where I'd wound up after all these years, or maybe just thinking about the rats in the trenches again. I thought of the way my saxophone felt under my fingers as I watched a crowd of strangers throw me cheers over the din of clinking piano keys and rattling snares. I thought of the last time that the word "home" still meant anything to me, and how I never knew what "a thousand miles" meant until it passed right under me while I slept. And I thought of the smoky London skyline, and what the Englishman's doctor friend would say to him if he could see him now, thin and shivering, by the shore of some strange jagged land that might have been nowhere at all.

"Just this once," the Englishman said. His eyes were like a beggar's.

I took him by the arm and walked him down the gangplank that led to the shore. I could feel his old bones swaying with the pitch of the ship. His skin felt like paper. Side by side, an old man and a young man, we left two sets of footprints in the ocean-damp sand.

Ahead of us, there was a little jutting shelf in a sheer face of rock, just low enough to reach. When I looked back in the ship's direction, I could see the lights from crewmen's pipes darting back and forth like fireflies among their stooped, shadowed frames. The night was dark, though—this far away, they could never make out our movements.

"There," the Englishman rasped, pointing ahead.

There was something waiting on the cliff face. At first I took it for a stretch of bare branches, but I drew closer and saw what it was.

A box, at least eight feet long and three across, with a nailed-on lid.

We moved towards the box, and the Englishman lowered his sack and loosened the string holding it shut.

He reached in and pulled out a metal crowbar, about three feet long and speckled with rust. He laid a little gas lantern next to it, and he coaxed the lantern's flame to a bright burn as he picked it up and held it above the box. I picked up the crowbar.

"The lid…" he murmured. "Help me get it open."

I furrowed my brow as I turned to face him.

"You know what's in there," I said. "You came this far for it."

He was silent.

"Tell me."

He hung his head down, his eyes clouded over.

"Just be ready for what you see."

The wood was weak, soaked through with rain. The lid came free with just one lift, and I fell to my knees, scrambling backwards as far as my hands and feet would take me.

A stench, stronger than any I'd ever known, hit me like an open hand.

A body lay in the box, its flesh left dry and withered and paper-thin, stretched tight across the, sharp ridges of bone. The mouth stood open and gaping in a silent scream, the eyes nothing more than hollow pits. The fingers were clasped around a knife, and the maroon stains of long-dried blood soaked the wood under the neck.

I wanted to sob, but I found myself choking. I wanted to crawl away, but I found myself clawing at the rocky soil under me.

I felt the Englishman's arms around me. A few minutes passed, and he pulled me to my feet.

"Who…?" I choked out. "Who the hell would do this?"

"This was no murder," he said. "They only left him nailed in the box. The fatal throat wound, though… Poor Mr. Kindering did that to himself."

_Kindering_. The second time I'd heard that name.

The Englishman stooped down to pry the man's fingers apart, and pick up the knife. I saw the blood that stained the blade, dried to a black glaze. Then he handed the knife to me, and I ran my fingers over the notched wood of the handle and the curve of the steel edge, testing its weight and shape.

"They left him shut up, with no way out and no one to call for help," the Englishman said. "Just left him with a knife. I suppose he held out for an hour, at most. When he couldn't take it any longer, he turned the knife on himself and opened his jugular to end it all."

"You know his name? How? Who the hell is he?"

"John Kindering," he told me. "I knew him when he was just a lad. His mother had a cottage in the South Downs, just a short walk from where I kept the hives. I remember her taking the long way to my house every Sunday to buy honey. She always brought me a loaf of her warm bread to spread it on. Sweet Abigail… Even when my eyes started to go, I could always hear her whistling half a mile down the road."

His eyes went rheumy, but he didn't bring up a hand to wipe them. "She raised John alone. No other choice, after her husband got caught in a foundry accident in London when the boy was still in the crib. She did all she could for him, after that. Even moved to the country, looking to raise him somewhere better. He was all she had. But then he got old. Then he found the taverns, the sailors and the easy women. Decided if he ever made his fortune, he'd do it miles away from the Downs. When he was sixteen, he found a spot on a ship docked at Liverpool, and he set sail as a deck hand before his mother could stop him. That was the last time Abigail Kindering ever saw her son."

For a moment, he let the words hang on the air.

"So what are you doing out here, then?" I asked him.

The Englishman sighed. "A year went by, and she realized that the boy wasn't coming back. So she came to me. Thought I could find something out. I bought my passage with the money that she brought to me. If she could lie down to sleep at night knowing that John was still alright, I suppose that would have been enough for her."

"But why did she come to you?"

"A reputation is a hard thing to shake, no matter how much you might want to," he said. "My years with the doctor left their mark, I suppose. Even the police in the country know my track record."

"What were you?" I asked. "A cop? A private detective?"

"_Consulting_ detective," he said. "I told Abigail I was retired. But for her, I took one last case."

"Then how did you do it?"

"It took me weeks, but I knew everything before I secured my passage. An innkeeper in Liverpool remembered John's face and told me what ship to look for. A bribed naval officer told me about the sudden rash of opium smuggling around these islands. A look at your captain's documents told me all I needed to know about the discrepancies in your vessel's official routes. A bit of poking around in the holds told me everything else."

With that, he withdrew his hand from the pocket of his overcoat and showed me a handful of green, bulb-shaped little plants.

Opium poppies.

"You knew you would find him out here?"

"I had suspicions. I was able to exchange some words with a few men in the penitentiaries for smuggling. I'm still on pleasant enough terms with Scotland Yard, I'm happy to say; they arranged all the interviews I needed. With the right maps and the right tip-offs, finding the right island was simple. Your Captain's methods have quite the reputation. He doesn't deal lightly with dissent. Or disloyalty."

My breath caught in my throat.

The Englishman looked out towards the ship. Maybe I heard him sigh. Maybe it was just the sea lapping at the rocks on the beach.

"You don't have to tell her," I told him, my voice breaking. "Just tell her he died peaceful. Tell her he died in a bed somewhere, with all the other sailors looking on. Tell her they all told stories about him in the pub when he was gone."

The Englishman closed his eyes and breathed deep. "Put like that," he said. "You almost make it sound simple."

* * *

When we made it back up the gangplank, the crew was swarming around the deck. Bainer and Kane waited for us by the railing. On the other side of the boat, the Captain waited, his arms crossed behind his back. His head was shaved, and his eyes were that pale shade of blue that lit up his face like candles, even when you saw them in the dark.

He gave me a cold smile as he strode down the deck, silencing the chattering crewmen around me with a nod.

"A little stop's nothing to get our spirits down about, boys," he said. "The holds are full, the boilers are hot, and the seas are calm. And we'll be docking down in Lisbon in just six weeks. You remember that, now."

The Englishman shot me a sidelong glance. In my pocket, my fingers closed around the knife, still stained with Kindering's blood.

I thought of the lights of Brooklyn glinting like stardust on broken glass, of the needle marks on my arm, and the way my lungs burned, months ago, when I swore to God that I'd never beg for anything again.

I thought of the crowds milling around the port at Lisbon, of the din of the city's portside bars where fights broke out every night, where men turned up strangled or stabbed in the gutters with their pockets looted, and where sailors vanished every morning with no roads to follow but the ones written in ocean waves. I thought of all the empty dead-end alleys I'd have to choose from if I looked long enough, of how much liquor I'd need in me to raise a knife to my torch-eyed captain, and of what it would take to vanish into the chattering crowds dragging a half-blind Englishman behind me.

I squeezed the knife to remind myself it was still there, and I thought of Kindering's hollow eyes. After that, the rest came easy.

"Six weeks to port," I repeated to the Captain. "Just six weeks."


End file.
